I was talking about releasing my emotional baggage to a friend the other day. She was, perhaps, having some misapprehensions. First, she was asking about my revisiting the memories, and using the sweeping breath to get rid of the emotional baggage associated with the memories. Her first reaction was that I was erasing my memories.
I reassured her that The sweeping breath does not erase memories. It does, in fact, enhance your memories. The more sweeping breath work that I have done the sharper my memories become.
Then she said she would not want to do this activity. I asked her out of curiosity, why. She replied that she had many good memories and she would not want to lose all those good feelings. Once again, I tried to explain, like the memories themselves, the feelings you have from those instants in your past are not erased. “You are getting rid of the attachments to those emotional memories, not the emotional memories themselves,“ I said. You can always sit down and go back to those memories and relive them after doing the sweeping breath. It will in fact be much easier after doing that practice, in fact.
“Then what are you getting rid of?” she asked. “You are getting rid of the invisible strings those experiences have that pull you this way and that and make you react to situations rather than pro-act to situations.”
To go further, I explained, “You will go into situations without a precharged emotional set, so that you cannot be prone to more emotional reactions … it’s like going in neutral, and unbiased.” The emotional baggage gives you a silent bias to react in certain ways which are usually not in your greatest interest, and often reinforce existing relationships which may not be that productive. By getting rid of the emotional baggage, you can go into situations fresh and unbiased.
In this sense, the positive attachments are also just as worthwhile to drop. They usually charge the emotional self in ways that are not beneficial. We tend to create unrealistic expectations based on them. Or we compare our situation now to those pasts situations and come up feeling wanting and often feeling depressed. The feelings we have in those memories do not get erased, but our attachments do, and that is always to our benefit, especially for creating new positive memories and experiences.
Put another way, we have positive and negative emotions, but attachments are not positive or negative, they are just attachments. The fewer attachments we have the more liberated we are, the more freedom we have to create new positive experiences. You could say we become better and better captains of our ships.